Tag Archives: broken banjo

The weekend of the 29th and 30th November promises to be a good one. The ME5 album (our fifth annual download compilation of Medway music) is in the can and ready for digital release at midnight on Friday 29th November, all 58 tracks of it, and the Just Giving page for donations to Young Minds is under construction. For reasons we’ll come to in a minute, we thought a five year run was worth celebrating with a more than one event, so think of the weekend as a mini-festival.

On Friday 29th November you will have two choices: You can come to the Nag’s Head in Rochester to see Broken Banjo, The Flying Isaacs and The Flowing, or you can go to St Mary’s Social Club in Gillingham to hear acoustic sets by Theatre Royal and Wildfowl plus some open mic performances.

On Saturday 30th we’ll be at the Barge in Gillingham for performances by Balance Lost, Natalie Evans and Chris ‘Arfur’ Allen for a gig that will serve not only as an after launch party for the ME5 album, but also as a ‘goodnight and thank you’ from Medway Eyes. Not only will ME5 be the last album we put out, this will also be the last ever Medway Eyes event. We’ve achieved a lot along the way, but five years is a long enough run for a good idea and it’s time to pursue other things.

It’s almost that time again. The 27th of October sees the release of our fourth annual charity download compilation of Medway music. Once again, it’s at the Nag’s Head in Rochester where we’ll be joined by Crybaby Special & The Monsters, with support from The Muswells, These Guilty Men and Broken Banjo. The music kicks off at 8:30pm and ends at 11pm. These launch nights are very well attended, so get there nice and early.

This year’s album is our biggest yet, with over fifty tracks from local artists and featuring cover art by the brilliant Lupen Crook. It will be available to download via this site from midnight on Saturday 27th October, right after the gig. When you download the album, you will be encouraged to make a donation to this year’s charity. It’s called Holding On Letting Go and is based in Rochester. It supports bereaved children, young people, (6-16) and their families and carers in Kent and Medway who have experienced the death of an important person in their lives. Please donate what you can when the time comes.

We’ll reveal the full line up when we release the album. In the meantime, feel free to plug the hell out of the event and album. You can download a high resolution version of the above poster here.

Thanks again to everyone who came to the Barge last week to help us raise money to keep The Medway Broadside online and afloat for another year. As well as playing, Rew shot some hand-held footage of all the performers, and you can now see a song from each of them below. It was quite an evening. You can probably tell that :0)

We’re pleased to announce this splendid line-up for our forthcoming Americana evening at the Barge on Saturday 14th July. The event will be a fundraiser for the Medway Broadside, an independent news and culture paper for the Medway Towns whose print and online editions are produced through the efforts of a skilled and dedicated team of local volunteers working together to produce an eloquent and representative voice for the community. The Broadside covers local news, politics, arts, culture and sport, providing an incisive take on events in Medway, whilst celebrating and promoting local creativity. We’ll be raising money to keep it online for another year and fund this Autumn’s print run.